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Alexander the Great's love for Hephaestion 'is celebrated in a Hellenistic relief (preserved in a Roman Syrian marble copy, approximately 200 B.C.E.), which shows the nude Alexander standing next to the clothed figure of his lover'.

ROME.

Mann reminds us that the Roman Emperor Hadrian commissioned numerous (partially clothed) statues of the beautiful young Antinous for display throughout the empire.

'Scenes of lively nude male figures engaged in a wide variety of sexual activities covered the walls of bathhouses' (such as the House of Jupiter and Ganymede, Ostia, Italy, 184-192 C.E.).

'David is shown wearing a hat, popular among young working class youths in Florence. The intense naturalism with which the adolescent body is depicted suggests the artist's careful (and admiring) study of his apprentices.'

Albrecht Dürer portrayed naked men 'provocatively gazing at one another in the contemporary setting of the Bathhouse (woodcut, 1496); he emphasized the sexual implications of the scene by placing a cock (rooster) on top of the large faucet that projected in front of one of the figures.'

Michelangelo 'revealed his conflicting feelings about his sexual desires in a pair of drawings in made in 1533 for his beloved Tomasso Cavalieri: Ganymede, which depicts the beautiful, nude adolescent being carried up to heaven by an embracing eagle, and Tityos, which shows an eagle eating the intestines of a very similar figure.' http://gallery.euroweb.hu/html/m/michelan/4drawing/index.html

Same sex relations became legal at the time of the French Revolution and Napoleon.

Numerous prominent artists 'exhibited paintings of overtly homoerotic nudes at the Paris Salons in the early nineteenth century'.

Hippolyte Flandrin's Figure d'Etude (1835), 'which depicts a youthful model with his head bent down onto his raised knees, freed the homoerotic subject from the requirements of a mythological or historical theme.' Hippolyte Flandrin in the Art Renewal Center